The best minds of my generation …

With an eye for the sort of detail that put him on the front lines of 20th-century spacefaring, physicist Hermann Oberth gave a 1958 speech on the UFO drama that couldn’t have gone over well with the Pentagon brass. Noting how “the disks always fly in a manner as if the drive is acting perpendicular to the plane of the disk,” the mentor to rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun remarked upon how UFOs often glow upon acceleration, which could reach bone-pulverizing, radar-recorded speeds of “19 km/sec.”

'The appearances are usually described as disks, sometimes as balls or ellipsoids. It sometimes happens that these disks place one upon the other, the largest in the center, the smaller toward the ends, to form an object the shape of a cigar, which then flies away with high speed.' -- Hermann Oberth/CREDIT: kiosek.com

“The accuracy of such measurements has not been doubted,” he wrote on a somewhat disjointed notecard cited in a new book, UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. “If there would be only 3 or 4 measurements, I would not rely upon them and would wait for further measurements, but there is existing more than 50 such measurements the wireless sets (radar) of the American Air Force and Navy, which are used in all fighters, cannot be so inaccurate that the information obtained with them can be doubted completely.”

Did you get that? The “Father of Space Flight” is making extrapolations from the military’s own data.

Significantly, the Hungarian-born scientist didn’t deliver that speech in the States where, by 1958, candid appraisals of The Great Taboo were unofficially verboten. Instead, he spoke out in Germany, shortly after leaving his U.S. employers at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal lab in Huntsville, Ala. Today, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics honors his sanctioned inquiries with the Oberth Award for outstanding individual achievement in space science. A more complete tribute to Oberth’s legacy (“They are flying by means of artificial fields of gravity,” he declared in 1972) should prompt the AIAA to recognize scientists for groundbreaking UFO research. But those prospects are untenable, thanks largely to the forces that drove the honest brokers underground decades ago and left behind the debilitating inertia that persists today.

Dr. Michael Swords began tracking our national cognitive dissonance as a teenager, when he first read USAF Capt. Edward Ruppelt’s The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects in 1956. Today, at 72, with the publication of UFOs and Government, the retired science professor has completed a lifetime’s worth of work that begs a series of what-if scenarios, not the least of which is: What if the world’s brightest minds, e.g., Hermann Oberth, had been encouraged to openly investigate UFOs before the fix was in? How might our history — world history — have been different?

As a former editor and researcher with The Journal for UFO studies, Swords has long been frustrated by history’s gatekeepers, their aversion to rendering the complete story of postwar America as UFOs zig-zagged through the early stages of the Cold War. The Western Michigan University emeritus professor says UFOs and Government’s mission statement is to plug that gap as a reference book.

“I can’t send the best condensation of this material to academic journals, except maybe to some folklore ha-ha kind of deal,” says Swords. “Editors say to you ‘There’s no way I want to publish something this controversial.’ It’s a fantastic sociology that leaves me constantly amazed.”

Certain his primary sourcing will stand the test of time, Swords says UFOs and Government isn’t for his peers, but perhaps for a more distant generation of bolder and more adventurous academics.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have a significant impact on academia; all I can control is the quality of my work,” he says. “The (Freedom of Information Act) stuff tells you what’s going on in the other side of the mirror, exactly what was embedded into that world. Now it’s there for anyone who is curious and might want to know what happened.”

Spoiler alert for those in that category: The military’s lead in the flying saucer fiasco packed a body blow from which science has yet to recover.